During the negociations for the present CBA, in December 2004, the players put an offer to the owners, in order to kick start something and get things going. Bob Goodenow put a 24 % roll back on the players salaries in the first year after the lock-out. It’s pretty certain now, that the players got that back in the second year, especially guys like Brière, Ovechkin, Gomez, Drury and many others that signed contracts after the 2005-06. What a joke. When parts of the current CBA where made public in the days following the end of the lock-out, everyone in the media, the pundits, all seemed pretty convinced that the players took a major beating in this. Here we are in year three of the cap world, it’s clear now and it will get more so from now until the end of this CBA, that the owners once again screwed up. The Brière, Gomez, Richards, Drury and now Ovechkin deals, show the owners have not learned a thing.
The main objectif of bringing in a cap system, is to keep salaries at a reasonable range, but this has not happened because of the way the present cap is structured. It’s not a hard cap, it’s more a soft cap. A hard cap of 42 million in the first three years of the CBA would of curbed the growth of salaries. At this moment, on average, teams are spending more than they did in the year before the work stoppage. In that season, the average was around 44,5 million per team, for this season, it is around 46.5 million, and this in a cap system, the other had not cap, so the cap is not working like it should. The amount I mentioned in the cap system, is the average amount of salary for the length of his contract, and not the actual paid out amount. In time, the small market teams that this CBA was suppose to help out, will feel the squeeze before the life of this agreement is over.
A whole season lost for nothing.
